The XML module in Phobos

[Michel Fortin]

On 2009-08-01 00:04:01 -0400, Benji Smith <dlanguage at benjismith.net> said:

> But XML documents aren't really lists. They're trees.
> 
> Do ranges provide an abstraction for working with trees (other than the 
> obvious flattening algorithms, like breadth-first or depth-first 
> traversal)?

Well, it depends at what level you look. An XML document you read is 
first a list of bytes, then a list of Unicode characters, then you 
convert those characters to a list of tokens -- the Tango pull-parser 
sees each tag and each attribute as a token, SAX define each tag 
(including attributes) as a token and calls it an event -- and from 
that list of token you can construct a tree.

The tree isn't a list though, and a range is a unidimentional list of 
something. You need another interface to work with the tree.

But then, from the tree, create a list in one way or another 
(flattening, or performing an XPath query for instance) and then you 
can have a range representing the list of subtrees for the query if you 
want. That's pretty good since with a range you can lazily iterate over 
the results.


-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/